64 vs. Sunshine

Just some thoughts on the whole 64 vs Sunshine debate since I started playing sunshine on my wii after yesterday's stream and I have to say... I think the people who say Sunshine is better than Mario 64 might be on to something! Sure, 64 is without a doubt a landmark game, perhaps THE most significant 3D game of all time but having played 64 recently as well, I would choose to play Sunshine over it any day. Putting them side to side today, I think Mario Sunshine is straight up the better game if we judge them by the same standards. I think people might be looking at Mario 64 with too much nostalgia. The 3D movement on an analog stick at the time was amazing but it isn't perfect and certainly not superior to Sunshine (At least not to me) and the platforming and level design is pretty rudimentary compared to most of Sunshine. People also complain about the hard parts of sunshine but personally I do like the steeper difficulty curve and the pure platforming sections are especially awesome. F.L.U.D.D is great too!

One thing I will say is this: The inverted camera Y AND X axis sure is a classic boneheaded nintendo move! Come to think of it, this game might be the reason i've inverted all my controls ever since. Hmm..

I think most people bag on sunshine because its core mechanic is kind of lame and hurts the level design/gameplay experience. Spraying water on stuff is just not as fun and versatile as pure platforming mechanics paired with great level design. The core gameplay mechanics of 64 are strong enough to be featured in every major 3D Mario game since. Floyd was a limited gimmick. That's the difference between the two games.

I think most people bag on sunshine because its core mechanic is kind of lame and hurts the level design/gameplay experience. Spraying water on stuff is just not as fun and versatile as pure platforming mechanics paired with great level design. Floyd was a limited gimmick.

What are you talking about? I for one was VERY happy to see Mario return to his blue-collar roots, albeit switching from plumbing to janitorial work. Nothing is more fun than cleaning up a bunch of ugly brown "paint" that may actually be raw sewage from the pipes that Mario failed to maintain while he was fighting Bowser.

That's why the janitor simulation genre is so popular to this day!

In all seriousness, Mario Sunshine is obviously more polished than Mario 64 and I like Sunshine okay, but F.L.U.D.D. is not the only problem with Sunshine. It's just an unfocused sort of mess of a game, while still being good. It lacks 64's smaller levels with focused bite sized challenges and replaces them with just...too much stuff. Shadow Mario and blue coins and a weird little story...

It's not a better game. It's more polished and has a better "feel" to it, while also looking and sounding better, but it's not a better game.

Sunshine benefits from lessons learned from 64's development (and the addition of a camera stick), but it doesn't live up to the revolutionary legacy of its predecessor. That's really the long and short of it.

I think 64 is a better game, but I gotta admit I was confused during the stream when they kept saying Sunshine played badly. It's been a couple of years since I last played it, but Sunshine plays/feels great. All the classic abilities and the newer fludd-based stuff are tremendously fun to use. I think their issues came down to two things: they went in wanting to hate it, and they didn't get enough uninterrupted time playing the game to figure it out. I don't expect to have mastered a game within my first ten/fifteen minutes of play, and their history would suggest they don't either. I guess they were playing it up for the stream, but I dunno, whatever they were doing wasn't really that entertaining this time around. Their next stream will probably be better.

They're probably worth the time of the people who like the games, which is probably at least half the gaming community.

Anyway, I've gone back and forth on this question and I can't come to a conclusion. I will say Sunshine is probably the most flawed game of the two, at least for their time. Sunshine has some hilarious blue coin shit and too many cutscenes...also bad voice acting. 64 is a tad dated but just more pure. Both are great though

Mario Sunshine did improve on allot of things 64 brought to the table like controls,camera and the missions themselves were far more complex and intrigued . 64 still has the edge over Sunshine in terms of world count though, 15 vs 8 is not really favorable even if the levels in Sunshine were larger and 64 was a bit more nonlinear in terms of structure. But yeah if we held them up to the same standard i can definitely see why somebody would prefer Sunshine. Plus its aesthetic is such a breath of fresh air for the Mario series even to this day. In other words Sunshine is much better than a 8.0 Great game.

Super Mario 64 is either the best or second best game on its system while Super Mario Sunshine is not even in the top 20 games on the GameCube.

I can see people thinking that Sunshine is a good game if they played it when it came out but when you come to a system towards the end of its lifespan (like myself who got a GameCube Christmas 2004) Sunshine stands out as the worst first party game on the console.

I can only confirm that I enjoyed playing 64 again last year. It is by no means a bad game in the modern age. But I haven't actually played Sunshine is like 10 years.

But please, can we all agree that Galaxy 1 and 2 are both freaking amazing games? I can't remember specifics, but I feel like I saw some lowkey shade thrown on them in another recent thread.

No

...OK, we probably can, and they're probably fine, but I really, really don't like playing games with the Wii-Mote. I played through Metroid Prime 1 and 2 with it last year because I couldn't track down my Gamecube's composite cable and I really wanted to play those games, but doing it that way just confirmed why I rarely played anything on Wii last generation.

@frostyryan: A lot of people didn't like the simplified movement system in galaxy compared to older 3d mario titles. For me personally I found the galaxy games to be a bit too easy but that may have just been because I was older when I played them.

I think its telling that (as far as I can tell) there has been no concentrated sunshine revisionist moment. Think Wind Waker. People didn't like it when it came out, then 7ish years later everyone was like "its actually the best zelda!" People didn't like Sunshine that much when it came out and nearly 20 years later theystill don't. the galaxy games are better than both though.

I went back to try and replay sunshine. I remember enjoying it at the time but man I don't know how I handled those controls. That game almost feels unplayable the way those controls are set up or maybe I was doing something wrong lol?

As someone who's beaten 64 pretty recently and played a good amount of Sunshine before eventually dropping it, my main points of contention with Sunshine were:

The worlds and design are not nearly as interesting

Too much busywork!

This first one is subjective, but I didn't find Isle Delfino that interesting or cleverly designed. It just didn't have the charm of 64's worlds, and it all tends to feel a little same-y after a while. There's no moments like discovering a world hidden behind a wall (every world in Sunshine is clearly foreshadowed) or losing my hat for the first time and going on a mad scramble to get it back. It feels a lot more streamlined and a lot less open, and there's usually only one way to get a Shine rather than improvising your own wacky solutions.

The second is just painful. I've 100%ed every 3D Mario ever released besides this and 3D World (never owned a Wii U, hoping for a Switch port), but I've always done it because I find completing all the challenges and doing everything the game has to offer to be really fun. Spraying an X and tracking down the corresponding X on the other side of the map is not fun. Neither is throwing fruit into baskets with imprecise controls, or having to stand on the very edge and drop it in. Both of these are boring and time-consuming, and because of that Sunshine didn't really have a sense of flow. It felt like I was stopping every few minutes to do some boring activity just to get another blue coin. Why is this system a thing?? Just let me get the Shines in the levels and hub world!

By contrast, I never even attempted to drop 64 once I got into it. So yeah, I'd say it's a better game

Mario 64 will always trump Sunshine. I didn't have much of a problem with Sunshine in gameplay when compared to 64, but to me, how immersed you can be is an underrated feat that I think aside from being one of the earliest 3D games is what makes it a legitimate work of art. I mean, people break down the mechanisms and glitches and (uh) "science" of that game to this day; they go back to those levels to screw around not necessarily just for nostalgic means but to genuinely find different ways to traverse the worlds. And if we're talking aesthetically, I find how in 64 you're running around in this castle isolated from the world inhabited by Toads that fade in with this cameraman quietly following you eerily enticing in a way that I can't ever see the game aging all that poorly from. Sunshine was developed in a sense to have you do more things, and for what it did it was fine if not occasionally frustrating, but it just couldn't capture that magic its predecessor had, however unintentional it may have been the first time.

Eh, the levels where you’re actually cleaning up junk in Mario Sunshine are few though. It’s only really the first level of each world and a couple others, so that’s about 10/120. Not really what the games about.

That being said the actual game has problems with level design at times, but not anymore than 64 which was a mess(the level where you raised &amp; lowered the water and needed those enemies to throw you up to higher levels? Christ that was horrible.) God I hated collecting 100 coins in 64, a terrible chore that had a damning influence on too many games: the collectathon. In SMS it was tame by comparison.

Sunshine was the first mediocre core Mario game and right when the series stopped being the standard at which other games in the genre were judged. I still keep hoping the series will recapture what SMB3, World, or 64 did for gaming but I think that's wishful thinking.

Sunshine was the first mediocre core Mario game and right when the series stopped being the standard at which other games in the genre were judged. I still keep hoping the series will recapture what SMB3, World, or 64 did for gaming but I think that's wishful thinking.

It's pretty much impossible for any game to do what those games did these days. Gaming as a medium has matured too much. The last game I can think of that shook things up that much was Grand Theft Auto 3, and that was 2001, so about as close to the launch of the NES as to today.

The best we can hope for from Mario games is for them to be really good Mario games. A lot have come out recently. Odyssey looks fantastic. Mario is in a good place.

But will a Mario game ever redefine gaming the way that those earlier games did? No. It's too late for that. The dawn of a medium only happens once. Everything from here will be more incremental.

I enjoyed sunshine when it came out. I never quite finished it but I really did enjoy it.

I tried to go back to it recently and WOW I couldn't handle the controls and stopped [being less patient or going back and trying a game I once played vs a new game]. I will be honest the controls for super mario sunshine are pretty bad... BUT

I think the thing with Sunshine is... once you get used to their control scheme, and it eventually "clicks" into muscle memory in your brain where you don't have to think about it... that game is crazy fun to play. It just sucks to get to that point! The mobility and platforming in that game is excellent. Incredibly fun. It seriously just takes a long time to get those controls into muscle memory cause they are pretty bad. Seriously if they let you customize some of those controls when it came out... Sunshine would be a much better regarded game.

I think the thing is Dan on the stream was defending the controls by also having that equating to mobility and such. That is not the problem and those are separate things. The problem is the actual way the controller is set up. If you could hack that game, get rid of the inverted nonsense [as an option anyway] and change some buttons around there would be zero control issues.

If you can get the control layout to click into muscle memory, I think Sunshine is an overall better game than 64 that overall improves the genre in really great fun ways.

Anyway, I love the series they started with Sunshine, and I love how they are having trouble with the controls cause it is pretty funny XD. However I bet they will eventually get used to it.... but them playing it not often enough may make that a problem haha.

I always did like Sunshine. I was into the tropical vibe of the game and I thought the Fluud was fun to use. It's not an easy game and there are definitely issues with the camera, but as a whole I thought it was very good. One thing you can almost always count on Nintendo to do is try something different, and it definitely was that. I never owned a N64 so I can't compare it with Mario 64.

Sunshine seems kinda bad. I don't know if that's just 2017 talking, but I just don't see how it would have been fun even in its day. I generally love GBeast content, but "Steal My Sunshine" is a series I'll probably skip because the game simply seems a bit crappy, despite the crew's best attempts to make it entertaining. That Dan felt compelled to make a metagame around the game is an effort I appreciate, but it arguably speaks to how little Sunshine brings to the table on its own.

Also, I'd argue that many of the Mario games are a little overrated, as people's eagerness to like them is often based more on nostalgia/affinity for the character than the quality of the game itself. Sunshine just seems to lean heavily on a gimmick that for me wore thin quickly. Also, how is default, unchangeable horizontal invert a thing? What kind of monster uses that as a control scheme? There are fairly valid arguments for both inverted and non-inverted Y-axis control schemes, but there is no reasonable defense for inverting the X-axis.

Sunshine seems kinda bad. I don't know if that's just 2017 talking, but I just don't see how it would have been fun even in its day. I generally love GBeast content, but "Steal My Sunshine" is a series I'll probably skip because the game simply seems a bit crappy, despite the crew's best attempts to make it entertaining. That Dan felt compelled to make a metagame around the game is an effort I appreciate, but it arguably speaks to how little Sunshine brings to the table on its own.

Also, I'd argue that many of the Mario games are a little overrated, as people's eagerness to like them is often based more on nostalgia/affinity for the character than the quality of the game itself. Sunshine just seems to lean heavily on a gimmick that for me wore thin quickly. Also, how is default, unchangeable horizontal invert a thing? What kind of monster uses that as a control scheme? There are fairly valid arguments for both inverted and non-inverted Y-axis control schemes, but there is no reasonable defense for inverting the X-axis.

So, yeah. Mario 64 all the way.

They're bad at Super Mario Sunshine. Giantbomb in general aren't really great at games, but GBeast is really bad at playing Mario Sunshine. if I didn't know for a fact that these people have been playing games for decades, I'd have assumed they started a few months ago based on the footage in Sunshine. A huge part of the reason this game looks like it hasn't aged well is because they're not very good at it.

I played more Sunshine then 64. But if i had to chose one to go back to today it would be 64. Sunshine had and still has terrible controls, GB East isn't making these things up the camera and aiming especially is a war crime.

Like someone else said, once the controls click the game gets way more fun and interesting. It would be frustrating watching a single person get to that point, let alone three. It also definitely seems like they're dealing with some input lag. That being said, I'm loving the series. Sunshine 4 Lyfe!

Going back to 64 is like eating a plain bagel. Its basic af. Its 3d Mario stripped completely bare of any flair, style, or interesting mechanic. Going into it without any nostalgia is a little rough. Although I still enjoy it, I would never recommend it to someone who had only played modern Mario games.

Sunshine's FLUDD doesn't hold a candle to Galaxy's gravity, but at least its something. The only problem is the wonky controls. For those of you who can't get used to them(and own a legit copy of Sunshine), I wholeheartedly recommend playing on the Dolphin emulator. You can switch the axis on the camera controls and make it a MUCH more pleasant experience. Not to mention making it render at 1080p 60fps with anti-aliasing. Almost makes it look like a Wii U game.

Super Mario Sunshine maybe the newer game when compared to Super Mario 64, but I always find myself coming back to Super Mario 64 more whether it's casually playing the game to 70 stars or going for all 120 Stars. It's not like I haven't gotten all 120 Stars in Sunshine, but I have quite frankly only done it once.